[applause] its wonderful to be back so i thought i would give you some of the major ideas that are in the book. Recently essentially see your eyes glaze over then we go to q a so i am in the fifth week to you physically the same talk so i am pretty tired of it. [laughter] blige just thought i would move past that to have the of bit more of a conversation. I think this is an engaged groupon we have had some really good discussions not only the technical detail but the geopolitical mitscher so to me that is the interesting part i will try to throw out enough to talk about but not so much i go into the question and answer time. I started to write september 2009. Rights after i was ambushed in afghanistan is this is one of the classic scenario is. Most live in mountain valleys of the little villages nobody really lives high on the mountains they live on the valley floor and usually there is only one road. By 4 00 in the afternoon everyone knows exactly where. Kid you hear me okay . And then youll be driving down the road in the middle of the valley. I was ambushed 4 00 in the afternoon i remember thinking every deadbeat this is that bad ambush i have been involuntarily of gillespie is actually used to teach it as an instructor i thought if they are my students i would fail them. Was badly put together. Are they having a bad day . That i realized after that one day of thinking about it it was not a taliban ambush but a particular village in the valley that was passed about how much aid we had given to other villages they were sending us a message how they felt about our aid prior to rescission that seems like a crazy over reaction we will know that happens all the time that with the assistance we give to afghanistan that is 14 times the size of federal budget is responsible for a substantial amount of what we see on the ground. And in afghanistan doing exactly the surface layer to look beyond what is actually going on that you dont actually see immediately. What i have tried to do in the book is to start that conversation that i had in my head where i started to say there is a deeper level than just the Counter Insurgency dr. Not just about the insurgency fighting a government but a bunch of villages trying to get authority over other villages in the way people fight and also of the dynamics of conflict common not only to the insurgency but gains, militias, all sorts of non state groups that compete to control populations 24 7 over the planet were sown or not. But i started to realize what we do in afghanistan is a geographical fluke. Bettis with the book ended up being about. We have gotten really, really good at dealing with non state armed groups in a very traditional and Xenophobic Society in remote rural villages with only landlocked mountainous environment with a population density very low the connectivity is almost nonexistent. If you look to the future of the plan at what will happen after afghanistan is over and we move to the next round of conflict you will find that is not it at all but much more on the urban coastal and very highly connected environment. We will do a lot of the same things we have done. 80 of conflict is and always has been a regular in nature one of the main combatants is almost the non armed group more precisely with u. S. Military history there is a specific repeated patent that we do a barge scale operation about once every 20 or 25 years also the size of kosovo about every five or 10 years and that pattern goes right back to the middle of the 19th century and it is completely independent of policy makers preferences. Somebody say to the president say we would get out of this business . He is the seventh president to say the same statement over 80 years and there is no effect whether he wants to do it or not or how often. Looking forward we will do more of the same stuff but that environmental looks very different. Said four big factors drive that environment in to think about what is the shape and what impact it will have a and one is new, the force one on one to focus i will cover the first three. Number one. Urbanization. Number to population growth. Number three around the coast line and then connectivity which is a new factor. Starting with population growth at the beginning of European Industrial revolution and the population of the planet was about 750 million people. It took 150 years to double by 1900 we were out 1. 5 billion people then doubled again in only six years at 3 billion people can double again the 6 billion by the end of the last century and a dozen years since then we have that is slightly more than 1 billion people so today it is roughly 7 billion yen cc the accelerating pattern of population growth since the industrial revolution. Those who do projections looking at the demographics suggest we will not keep rising at the same level for ever be will top out at the middle of this century at about 9. 5 billion that is still 2. 5 billion more than we have no. With that same time frame we are likely to have a significant level of urbanization. In 1800 about 2 percent of people lived in the city of 1 million or more. 2 of the people of the plan in 1900, 10 percent from 1950, to to 5 . 2008, a 50 projection is 75 of people on the planet by the middle of the century. The Current Population wouldbe the urban population by the middle of the century. The third is the fact based on the mechanics of moving heavy stuff that most cities have traditionally been on the coastline. Look at megacities of the population of 10 million or more there either directly of the coastline or on a major river delta only four cities on the planet that are not. Beijing, tehran, a mexico city and moscow. Why is that . It is easier to move heavy things by water so trade has traditionally been river born so the cities would acroterion round of logistics so people moved to existing cities already the population is heavily live coral. 80 percent of the people today live within 50 miles of the coastland. Urban and crowded those are well understood 20 years ago in the marine corps in particular or to talk about the three block for or there were guys in the army as military theorist who wrote all about the stuff way back and well understood. But what has happened in the 10 years since the 11th, the military has been dragged off to this environment of a landlocked remote environment of afghanistan and the planet has changed. In the year 2000 there were only 30,000 as telephones in nigeria. Today there are 130 million. Doing field work in mogadishu i was Walking Around interviewing people about how to make a living in 24 of somalis use a cell phone. There is a big fight to but has said memorialized in a movie called plaque caulked around that happened around a major Market Downtown mogadishu. I was talking to traders in the market were the somali currency surviving 20 years without a central bank is traded on the floating interestrate they have computers set up, theyre on the internet, the understand International Currency in they trade the currency on the floor on the bottom floor five times per day they update the trading rate in dade fire it out by a text message to the traders in the city that is how the works of trades. Somalis have always been traders but until recently there were about Trading International stocks or managing remittance money from minnesota or scandinavia but that is what we see now. What i saw on the Ground Support is something that economists say access to the International Trading economy dependent on connectivity is a major element from the agricultural surplus why people move to cities. With the scientific terms it is like the salty solution or not salty solution on the other they will migrate from one side if you have the connectivity differential between urban and rural environments people will live to were the conductivity is. If you want to be plugged into an to the International Economy coming you have to be in mogadishu you cannot be with the countryside of somalia. We have seen a Significant Movement to cities driven in part by connectivity and that ships and changes the way conflict happens. I would give you two examples then i will summarize how to think about the environment. One is libyas the other is syria. In 2011 there was a very major fire in a coastal city if there was a french Naval Task Force ready to intervene in the conflict but they did not know much about what was going on on the ground. An urban city welleducated and libyans have exploded with access to soft loans over the internet. Of the kids were getting shot as they tried to move around the cities so they began to use gugler and android sell funds to plot the locations of the snipers shooting at them. They would put pins in the map dont go down that street. The french start to see these pins appearing on buglers. So they flew Reconnaissance Mission so then they obviously started to bomb those positions when the school kids realize to freemarket the french will baum it they went out to mark every position they could find and then whenever destroyed they would take them down and disappear from to coerce. Google immerse a crowd source synchronized bombing a system that the pentagon spent billions of dollars the school kids are on the ground because they have access to connectivity that would have been impossible three of four years ago. As far as i can tell talking to kids on the ground those on the French Task Force at no time did they ever talk to each other it was self synchronized based on what they could figure out. A second example is a little more analog. In syria last your for a couple of bad agencies we start to see these little or merge vehicles appearing one of them was 6 feet longer than three fell wide with arbor on the outside. It had a machine gun mounted on top to be controlled remotely with a series of video cameras mounted on the outside actually the. Pro on the top then inside was a flat screen tv in the whole thing driving the vehicle and the control was run through the flat Screen Television through the game boy. This is a backyard workshop. It does not make sense to have such debt tiny Armored Vehicle with a machine gun but seek it for this was a bit where it was built theca of the american styled Armored Vehicles or the soviet vehicle with the regime because the streets are 5 feet wide is not confronting other Armored Vehicles it is designed specifically to operate because federal have the ability. This is perfectly adapted to the environment. But now meeting a very tax savvy population then they have access to use tools to make it taken the backyard. Something not in afghanistan but to look get the urbanize savvy population and final example in the u. S. States of georgia may 2011 a 15 yearold ninth great kid looked at the libyans and thought they dont know how to use of Weapons Systems of the crowd sourced in 48 hours a diving gold medal to teach the libyans how to use the weapons they were capturing he got this from soviet websites and his friends in those to speak arabic. Today that is a major document used across syria with a fighting because neither word gun cultures you deal with people that came up in a gun culture sir buddy knows how to fire a weapon. What i sat with the nafta and travel editor i ask where the ied techniques came from he told his 50 yearold they make me one. They just no hope but they just know how but syria or libya did not have that background banal a kid in United States in 48 hours can pull together a middle that is now the dominant document that people downloading repeatedly it is out there as a key element how people operate in syria. Not to be labored up point but to understand not only do we need to be engaged with the urban environment because we have been distracted of 10 years that will not be in the future norm but in that time it has changed and is dramatically more connected than it was. So the topic that i end on how to understand the urban environment under stress producing violence in and this will be happening across the planet. Some marks was a social scientist looking at european cities cities, berlin, london, were experiencing many of the same things of coastal cities today. We look at lack of Government Services the of communities and people getting alienated that they need to access and how that affects people, there is a lot of similarities but there was the idea of durbin metabolism to write an article that has become very seminal called the metabolism of cities. To basically say just like a body a city has one serious intake, carbon, fuel comair, people, then they are transformed in produces the biomass of this city is in the energy it needs to function but it produces toxic waste. The city has to have the carrying capacity to deal with those byproducts where you see pollution. This is a common procedure in ecology to look deadbeat urban environment to run the material flow analysis of it has the capacity to do with the flow if it is experiencing. I have a number of case studies from jamaica to other places to do and on material flow analysis. Instead of carbon or water but many, drugs, information system, weapons, how they fall in what toxic byproducts, usually violence is generated and what is the way this city can use to cope with the flow. If you look at the problem the military does not figure in the answer there is no solution to the problem of rapid unplayed and urbanization to sew skins 3 billion new people in the next generation across the entire planet. To put an Army Division into one of those and it would disappear nobody would even know. Cities that have 25 billion people come with the entire west coast of india and giant cities not in the military sense. Then they do get into the tactics of how you do that but there is no solution that involves the military going in and. A problem focuses not and will evolve in a solution that is like saying it is Fire Prevention that doesnt help you if your in the fire department. Your job is not to worry about prevention but to fight the guy tim fire when it breaks out. What do i do plan Fire Prevention fails . If you are in the military there is a dead certainty that our political leaders will send us tuesday in fired because that is what they have been doing fed is not affected by the policy makers preferences. See better understand how to operate in a crowded urbanized coastal environment against the actor has access to democratize technology and connectivity that makes the adversary dramatically more the soul than what we have never encountered before. That is the environment the military needs to think about with significant implications the way restructure and the way we operate status and other side of the discussion but what do we do about the problem of . I think it is a matter of resiliency and communitybased design rather than government casting people on the head telling them to sit down and shut up by can talk to much more detail about what we have done with my company with ngos in africa to test the way to operate. I think it pioneered on the design or put them together with a community that understands the problem or comes up with the stuff of a particular is just billion to. Might challenge sen and rub my people do is have to do that in the environment with people shoot team and you . You just cannot have a conversation . Those are the places we worked and where people in the military and lawenforcement need to be focused. Because i have spent very down for the last 20 minutes i will end on the up and no. It is not all bad. 3 billion more people by the middle of the century not only could that be potentially very good for the planet by reduce pressure on the environment but 2 billion more people of the global middleclass 15 people out of poverty poverty, access to education thank economic prosperity. If you are in business there is a massive opportunity these cities have not even happened yet with the entire population will lead stuff just to get by in the big city. There is a significant upside with Good Research data to the adaptive capacity to handle these problems increases farther but there are certain things you have to have in place and one is the ability to make people more resilient so not only stop this with coastlines of the developing world but thinking about how to reach each People Choose swim and urban resiliency in a different way that exploits the adaptive capacity that is out there to help people a lot that as a way to engage with the problems . I could go on but i am bored with the same talk so lets have a conversation. I will defer to you. Just raise up your question cards. Good questions on the richter subjects. One that has come up batiste twice preparing for the last conflict what are some of the bad lessons that will be appropriately coming added the iraq and afghanistan experience for military or government Going Forward . Great question. To equal and opposite areas one might Counter Insurgency is the answer it is a doctrinal construct like any other a human model we are about to where a revolution the way we think about the environment but it is about time the other opposite areas calling is not the answer he got have to worry about protecting populations or to go into choosing is that governments can do. The history is pretty clear weather weighed know how to do it or not we will be sent in their. The other thing to highlight there is a dangerous addiction to the remote warfare. Lot nsa has been doing a avoiding putting troops on the ground and it always reminds me but war is so dangerous often it is perceived from cold hearted this and i think the worst american is to minimize the danger in damage that conflict does and one of those is the reliance on remote forms of technology to compensate our willingness to put troops on the ground. One of the only things that stops human beings from fighting is they have had a tough if you outsource to robots to create a precedent we can tell anybody anytime across the planet provided it meets us it could bounce back at some point. Host i see that. It a related question i